Voting on threads

I agree with that. Having both gives some opportunity for the community to balance any kind of abuse.

A downvote system could be equally beneficial to push down junk.

In fact, it could tie in nicely with the new article posting initiative if that is going to stick around. It would make it easier to see who the community feels the top contributors are and who perhaps needs to work a little bit on what they are delivering.

Why not,
People have been getting their cronies to upvote their threads.
Why shouldn't things be evened up?

I guess. But I know that when I view a vid on YouTube, I take the downvotes with a grain of salt if there is a much greater proportion of upvotes. However, if a vid has mostly downvotes, I know not to bother watching it (usually).

WTH is #sparta?

What? How does it add more room for abuse? I was suggesting making the thanks button have the same functionality as the up vote button. Either can be abused in the same way.

The post is not there, so you can get off of that.

Okay simple answer. So up/down votes are for the original post only.

See where I have seen them before, they are throughout the entire thread. Which, like I said, just did not make any sense. Why have both systems then?

And yes a down vote system can be abused, but so can a up vote or thanks system. You and I both know over the years there have been a lot of the circle-jerk WSO launch crowd that did that kind of thing to help eachother out. Having a down vote system might help to outweigh some of that, maybe.

I think you just implement a system and hope that the majority will outweigh the abusers, which are hopefully the minority.

And if there is a up / down vote system, it needs to stay out of the paid advertising section. Those people are paying for ads. They shouldn't have to run the risk of a pissed off buyer or competitor messing with their thread anymore than they already have to.

I'm trying to have a serious conversation.

And my point was why not combine the functionality and have them do both? I don't really see a good reason to make them separate.

If like Mike suggested, the voting is only on the OP, fine. That makes sense. What I said though was that when I have seen these things implemented on other forums, they exist on every individual post, and that made no sense.

@lgibbon, @RegionalWarrior: read my first sentence again.

@MikeFriedman: I do understand this could be gamified (as most things can). However, I still believe we would have a lot more to lose if we "encourage" or at least open up the possibility of negativity. There is always the report thread option.

@Khemosabi/Theresa: emojis allow different reactions but none are inherently negative as a downvote. You can just be "surprised" or "perplexed" I guess.

Getting disliked also means less motivation to keep posting threads/posts to users.

Dwelling a little bit more into Facebook not having a dislike button:

"You know, it took us awhile to get here. Because you know, we didn't want to just build a Dislike button because we don't want to turn Facebook into a forum where people are voting up or down on people's posts. That doesn't seem like the kind of community we want to create. You don't want to go through the process of sharing some moment that's important to you in your day and then have someone down vote it. That isn't what we're here to build in the world."

Full article found here if you are interested.

This is something that we have given a lot of thought to implement. But again the downside is far far greater than the upside.

Right now it's not going to happen.

We can however discuss other great ways to improve our user experience here.

Thanks all for participating and I remind you - once again - to keep your personal wars aside and discuss this like adults that hopefully we all are.

Let's take a look at a few more of the facts.

Data Mining Reveals How The “Down-Vote” Leads To A Vicious Circle Of Negative Feedback